Those who find evolution convincing need to rethink it a lot more carefully because the evidence is really not there to the extent you think it is. I suspect you are accepting as evidence all sorts of assumptions, speculations and hypotheses that are not evidence, and are taking most of it on faith in spite of yourself.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Watching a film at Netflix by National Geographic titled Sea Monsters. (I tried but couldn't get the "embed" function to work for the trailer.)

The film shows some geologists on a fossil hunt in Kansas, finding bones of prehistoric reptilian dinosaurian type sea creatures. They also find the more common ammonite fossil -- and it's interesting to see this as I had no idea what size to picture those creatures, and the fossil is a lot larger than I had visualized, about the diameter of a good sized serving platter I'd say.

It's the ammonite fossils they say tell them when all these creatures in the same vicinity lived, which is of course based on their Geologic Time Table that layers the physical world in time periods, just as Dr. A does as quoted in the post below. They always speak of the time element as fact although it is nothing but an imaginative construct that they impose on the sedimentary and fossil phenomena.

Speaking of it as fact is what I call "word magic." They don't need the actual processes of science to reify an imaginative construct into Reality and enforce it with indignant denunciations as "anti-science" of anyone who isn't convinced. "The poetry of reality" as Dr. A says, although it's just the poetry of fantasy.

Most of the film is animation of the creatures reconstructed from their fossils and shown swimming in the seas that supposedly covered the area for some huge length of time in the "Cretaceous" period, and the "Triassic" and "Jurassic." They do show the sea that bisected the continent of North America at one time, and I have no doubt there is evidence in shorelines that identify such a body of water that stood long enough for such markers to be evident, but of course I don't buy the millions of years explanation for anything.

No, I'm watching this as an interesting imaginative reconstruction of life forms that lived before the Noachian Flood and that were no doubt transported by that Flood to their resting places where they were buried and fossilized and where these geologists now find them.

The "sea" that bisected the continent was of course a temporary stage of the Flood after it had receded or at least begun to recede, as were all the ancient extinct large lakes of western North America such as Missoula and Lahontan and Bonneville. Simply large lakes that stood for some time after the Flood and then finally drained away, in some cases suddenly and catastrophically, probably due to the tectonic forces that occurred after the Flood and also built the Rockies. The catastrophic draining of one such great standing body of water is one very plausible explanation for the carving out of the Grand Canyon. Not a feat any ordinary river could have accomplished.

One funny thing: A few large fossils were found with food in their stomachs, one rather "stuffed to the gills" as it were, which prompted the speculation that it must have died of gluttony. Of another the narrator wondered why it would have died so suddenly after a good meal. Of course they conjured an explanation out of a hat as usual, but duh, folks, obviously the most reasonable explanation is that they were all caught in the same catastrophic event at the same time, some having just filled their stomachs.

Same phenomena, different interpretation, just as reasonable, no, really, more reasonable than the establishment interpretation.

I'm still following Dr. A's Geology presentations, though not intensively. Today he added a comment that is really the first time he's brought up anything controversial, so I have to at least note it.

There is an inordinate number of different kinds of sediment. This is just how it is. This makes the study of geology different from studying (for example) the theory of gravity. Instead of Einstein's single equation, geologists must study a vast variety of things that happen on the face of the Earth. Dust-storms blow, trees fall, the tide goes in and out, turbidity currents do their thing, glaciers do theirs, peat-swamps form, rivers dposit point-bars, inevitable chemical processes gnaw at the rocks, desert sand is piled up by the wind, coccoliths drift with immense slowness towards the seafloor, the tide makes flaser deposits ... and so on and so on.

And you don't quite see it all until you see it all. Before I undertook my own study of geology, I regarded sediment as the dirt one finds fossils in. Now I see landscapes. "Here" (we say) "are the remains of ancient mountains, long gone. Over their cloud-capped heads, the storm broke, and angry torrents flowed down and dwindled into the rain-shadowed desert when dinosaurs walked --- look, here are their footprints around the ancient oases. Vast was that expanse of sand, which the wind sifted for tens of millions of years. It was bordered by a great yet shallow sea ..."

In writing this textbook, I have to deal with this one sediment at a time, one ripple in the mud, one lamina in the sand, but when we look at it all together, we see vanished landscapes, lost worlds. Piece by piece we put it together, until we see the whole.

"Science is the poetry of reality."

This synthesis he makes from the great variety of geological phenomena, involving former "landscapes" that span huge periods of time, interpretive scenarios that he places in ancient time periods, is of course the standard Old Earth way of construing it. It's an imaginative construct laid over the phenomena, and of course the most predictable imaginative construct, and it is given without giving the logical steps by which he arrived at it. It's SOME kind of "poetry" but more like the poetry of biased imagination than the poetry of reality.

He promised to give the reasons "how we know" this or that as he goes, and he's been doing that but not on anything particularly controversial until now. In this comment he does not even try to say "how we know" about these landscapes, he simply says this is how he now sees it, how he puts it all together, which of course is how the establishment puts it all together.

But not how a Floodist would put it all together, and until he provides us with the logical steps that lead to his conclusion he deprives a Floodist of the necessary material to falsify his claims, just as this kind of "science" always does, always leaping to the imaginative Big Picture, always Telling the Story of past events as they dream them up and letting that stand for Science, while slighting the particular phenomena that led them to their interpretation.

THIS is where you need to tell us "how you know" all this, Dr. A., and of course this is exactly where you DON'T tell us that. Please correct course. Thank you.

2 Peter 3:3-7 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as [they were] from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water. Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

MOST IMPORTANT BLOG POSTS

There's something very wrong with the thinking of a Christian who is more worried about being "fooled by God" in an erroneous judgment about, say, a radiometric dating conclusion than he is about being "fooled by God" in the Bible, very wrong because Christians supposedly believe the Bible to be inspired by God, but science is done by fallible human beings.===========================

You want me to respect science. How can I respect Geology when it accepts the idea that a worldwide stack of different kinds of sedimentary rock represents different time periods of millions of years each, and that the bazillions of catastrophically tossed and tumbled dead things contained in them, often in batches of their own kind, represent particular life forms that lived in each "time" period -- all while smugly proclaiming "there is no evidence" for a global Flood. This is so stupid it is amazing that it was ever entertained, but there it is, today's Dogma of Geology. I'm sure they do solid science in spite of it of course, kind of around and under and between it.

EVOLUTIONISM IS A STRONGHOLD TO BE SPIRITUALLY TOPPLED

2 Corinthians 10:3-5 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

PRAY IT DOWN!

About This Blog

What I want to do here is try to do my best job of stating my own favorite arguments against evolution. There are a couple I think really, logically speaking, ought to bring the whole system crashing down but of course it isn't that easy, human stubbornness being what it is.

There's the geological argument which is basically that you can see with your naked eyes that this world once went through a global Flood, as the Bible reports. That takes care all by itself of the whole Old Earth theorizing that evolution depends on.

And there's the biological argument: It is known that genes DON'T increase although evolution depends on increase. The MORE evolved a species the LESS genetic capacity to evolve it actually has. Breeders certainly know this; and conservationists also know this because genetic depletion in highly specialized species (such as the cheetah) makes them vulnerable to extinction rather than candidates for further variation.

I hope to post on these and other arguments as time permits.

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Ah heck, Mr. Dawkins, we CAN TOO imagine macroevolution by natural selection, same as you can. We can follow out the same Rube-Goldberg sequence of improbable events, acting in a homologically graded series of imaginatively fleshed-out fossils, events that have never been observed in living reality, to the same preconceived conclusion you come to. Our problem is that we know it flies in the face of probability, reason, logic and any other law of rational inquiry and science that may exist, AND that there is no evidence for it, whereas design OBVIOUSLY implies a designer -- obviously, intuitively, rationally, logically, reasonably and probabilistically -- and I'd add "absolutely" if I could get away with it.

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Thinking about the implications of the Biblical creation can sometimes draw you close to God in a way that has to be described as worship. That's the main reason for doing it I think.

IT ISN'T FOR LACK OF EXPOSURE TO SCIENCE

A description of my own experience in answer to the usual denigrating assumption that creationism requires ignorance of science -- not that I claim any scientific sophistication of course, merely a basic understanding of some basic facts and principles.Before I became a Christian I absorbed a lot of the thinking about evolution and tried my best to understand it. Even then I was often frustrated thatevidence trails could just about never be found or followed out to any kind of certainty and I found that I always had to give up trying to follow them and just take the conclusions of the scientists pretty much on faith.I definitely had an interest in understanding evolution. I believed in it; I wanted also to understand it, but I found my desire thwarted by the lack of evidence. Iread the Origin of Species, I read lots of stuff by Stephen Jay Gould, very entertaining stuff, I read Skeptical Inquiry regularly, and so on. I investigated the science claims for evolution about as far as the average intelligent non-scientist can be expected to.

It was only after I became a Christian that I got into studying the creationist answers and took seriously my earlier experience offrustration with the lack of evidence for evolution.I strongly wish that those who find it convincing would rethink it a lot more carefully because the evidence is really not there to the extent you think it is, I suspect you are accepting as evidence all sorts of clever speculations that are not evidence, and are taking most of it on faith in spite of yourself.